HTML: A Guide to Hard-Coding
Starting Your First Page
The first thing you must do is to open up Notepad, which is a basic text editing program.
You can find it by clicking on the Start Menu, then Programs, then Accessories.
You should have a program that looks like this:
You will be doing all of your programming in this program. Please note that Notepad does not wrap text. Therefore, you will often need to use your "enter" or "return" key on your keyboard.
Web pages are made with the help of your HTML code and a browser. The most common browsers are Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. This is what happens: You create the HTML code. HTML is simple computer language that tells a browser what to do. The browser is used to translate that code into something that you can see on the web page.
HTML code is basically a group of tags that look like this: < > What comes inside the tags tells the browser what to do. For example, if you would like to have a word bold, you would place the tag before the word. That would tell the browser to make the word darker. Sometimes you have to have an ending tag as well. Ending tags look like this: For example, if you want a word bold, you would write <b> the word </b>. This tells the browser when to start and stop the bold. If you forget to close the bold then everything that follows on your page will be bolded.
There are seven basic HTML tags that you must have in order to create a web page. These tags form a "shell".
- The tag <html> tells the browser that the language is HTML and not some other.
- The tag <head> is one we will talk about more later on.
- The <title> tag tells the browser what to put in the blue bar at the top of the browser page, called the title bar.
You must close both the <head> tag and the <title> tag.
The <body> tag is very important. Everything that appears on your page MUST come between the <body> and the </body>tags. You may have only one body tag on your page.
